I don't know if I buy that. Show me how I can guy a commodity on the market and have it delivered to my house. And the guarantee that process will work when the global financial system starts imploding. For the vast majority of people holding gold, their holdings are only on paper, and that's all they'll ever be.
If I'm stocking up on items with physical value to hedge a complete economic collapse, I'd rather have butane lighters, buckets, vacuum sealed sugar/salt/grains, water storage, and ammo.
Yes you should have all those things in a realistic quantity but after a survival ration, hording those items is not realistically your best bet. Ammo would probably be the best out of the lot, but it will only hold temporal value while the unrest is happening, lets say it's a really long unrest say a decade until peace is restored you still only have a 10 year store of wealth if you put it all in more ammo than you need, while gold will almost assuredly retain at least a decent portion of the wealth you stored in it. It might loose some value in initial unrest when and if people are in pure survival mode but will almost certainly take a primary status in the period between the ending of unrest and the stabilization of a fiat.
Also for myself personally, I purchased a simple test kit that most jewelers use. It is an electronic test kit that is very accurate for gold and platinum and when I look to reallocate some of my wealth to gold I buy scrap gold and test it. The kit was about a $200 investment but It allows me to buy the gold at a deep discount (deeper if it is not 24K) under the spot price for the day, you can melt it with a propane torch, that can be purchased from Home Depot and they make plenty of bar molds. It takes me about 5-10 minutes effort (short of procuring the gold) to turn scrap into bars. But if one does not want to go thru the effort, it's pretty easy to buy gold bullion at the spot price for the day + shipping, even on ebay there are plenty of reputable sellers. I don't trade in millions of dollars in gold and I have yet to liquidate any that I hold as I only hold about 3% of my total wealth in gold and I try to keep that pretty stable. Again I view it as insurance, not an investment, that being said if I liquidated it all today, it would have turned out to have been a pretty good investment.
I don't know if I buy that. Show me how I can guy a commodity on the market and have it delivered to my house. And the guarantee that process will work when the global financial system starts imploding. For the vast majority of people holding gold, their holdings are only on paper, and that's all they'll ever be.
If I'm stocking up on items with physical value to hedge a complete economic collapse, I'd rather have butane lighters, buckets, vacuum sealed sugar/salt/grains, water storage, and ammo.